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Help with PC please

8y, 10m agoPosted 8 years, 10 months ago

Hope someone can give me a bit of advice here. My pc has been playing up for a while now so I'm going to format my c drive to get rid of all the rubbish and start again. I have a HP Pavillion a1609uk with a recovery partition. My question is, if I format the c drive, would the PC still boot up using the partitioned recovery part or do I need my vista disc to install my operating system again?

Your PC will be set up to boot from the C:\ drive, so reformatting it will not work.

You may be able to run the 'recover disk' program from the D:\ drive without the need to reformat anything. There should be a help file or something similar to help you. If you DO need to create a recovery disk & boot from that then there will be a program included on the PC to do this for you. Look within the "Start - All prgrams" Menu.

Make sure that you make backups of ALL your important docs/pics/etc BEFORE you start:thumbsup:

Check your Bios and make sure the Recovery Partition is listed as a Bootable option. If it can be used to boot from then yes you can format and restore your pc this way. If not, and what you usually have to do is make a bootble CD and copy this partition onto it. My other question, "IMPORTANT" is what was your pc originally installed with if you have a Vista disc and a Partition. It may be the partition only has additional software on and then yes you need to instal the OS from your Vista disc first.

How big a problem do you have with your pc that a re-install is necessary. Do you have any cleanup software installed to try first like Advanced Windows Care. This is free and will clean out a load of rubbish and fix a number of issues. Here's the link for it, well worth a try.

thanks for the help guys. there is a program called hp recover. when choosing this it says that the hard drive will be formatted so I'm assuming using that option i will still be able to boot the pc. the pc was originally running xp mce and i received a free upgrade to vista. they sent me the vista discs so i installed from them but i cant find them. i burnt a recovery disc when i upgraded to vista but if i use that to recover then i presume it will go back to mce.
think i'll try the hp recovery option when ive backed up my important stuff